What mandate remains for either party?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Feb. 3, 2025 – Neither party has a valid claim on the affection and the allegiance of any American who would honor the principle of equal liberty and justice under law. Without equal liberty and justice under law, America becomes an insult to civilization, because the American revolution was an answer to the ancient prayers of the oppressed and down-trodden refugee from every place on earth.
During the last century, a diseased and broken world twice found the American sect to be the indispensable sect, because every sect at war throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa also has a home in America.
But, after the second war we transitioned straight into an often invisible sectarian war between competing systems of governance. No longer do warring sects organize around religious distinctions, but around conflicting economic schemes, around competing ways to provide for the needs of the people.
America was indispensable to the correct resolution of the two world wars, but we step beyond the bounds of our own constitution, and our own ideals, when we meddle in the domestic affairs of foreign nations.
At the heart and core of the American experiment in republican self-governance is an abhorrence of imperialism. Except for the arrogant imperialism of King George III, who overruled Parliament’s greater affection for the colonies, the American War of Independence may never have been waged.
Instead, imperialism, and subordination of the will of the people to the rule of a king, is the reason America was born of colonial parents. America cannot both meddle in the affairs of foreign nations and simultaneously guarantee equal liberty and justice under law at home.
The law of nature prohibits the dictator and the liberator from occupying the same body. It is an affront to freedom and liberty that America maintains forward operating bases in 80 foreign lands. The biblical admonition to be thy brother’s keeper is addressed to persons, not to peoples.
America did not intervene in Ireland’s religious war. Nor should we fight the wars of Palestine v. Israel, Shia v. Sunni, Hutu v. Tutsi, or myriad others. It is no mistake, nor casual fact, that the 1st amendment prohibits Congress from doing business with any establishment of religion – from Anabaptism to Zoroastrianism.
We can and must assist our foreign friends but we cannot fight their battles for them, nor should we allow them to deliver their domestic conflicts to our shores. What we are at home, so shall we be at sea, in space, and in other lands.
Nothing is more clear than the origin of the grand canyon of partisanship that divides America – the pernicious ugliness of McCarthyism. Roy Cohn was counselor to both Senator McCarthy and to the 45th and 47th president. When Cohn was diagnosed with what later became known as Aids, he was shunned by the person he claimed was his only friend, who now pretends to dictate from the Oval Office.
That betrayal alone disqualifies him from any office, but somehow the voters would rather believe what they hope is true, as they proudly ignore the facts on the ground.
With the mAgarian* sect now in complete control of the rogue party that before 1964 was the party of Lincoln, the opposing sect is dispersed into so many sub-sects as to allow the mAgarians command of all three branches of government.
It takes no great power of the imagination to glimpse a great scowl where History once stood poised to boast of the home of the brave and the land of the free.
What remains for us to discover is the source of the thirst that led the American electorate to sip so long at the felon’s fountain of falsehoods, that they got drunk and cannot fine their way home, as if the beacon in New York harbor looks to them like just another broad in a department store downtown.
*A mAgarians is someone who rallies around the flag of “make America great again.”